OTOH, if you look at another recent B-movie, Miami Vice, it too came it first place the weekend it opend but grossed $25M, almost double what SoaP did.
You are seriously comparing a movie based on a hit TV series with well-known popular characters and strong nostalgia appeal to a quickie thriller that nobody ever heard of before? It is amazing that SoaP made a tenth what Miami Vice made.
I have no idea, ask Philips - it's their monitor that won't display that particular resolution (and you're the one that linked to it). I would assume it has something to do with the 4:3 aspect ratio not lending well to the pixel density (or lack thereof) needed to display 1920x1080.
Actually, I didn't link to it. But it sounds about right for displaying 1920x1080 letterboxed.
Ignoring, for a moment, that I specifically referred to "CRT televisions" as opposed to "CRT technology" - your example does not support 1920x1080. The closest it will get is 1920x1440, and on top of that it's not the right aspect ratio.
So what, specifically, is the technical obstacle that makes 1920x1080 impossible for a CRT display, yet allows 1920x1440?
lol - are you kidding me? This post gets modded "Informative", yet my reply (with the actual facts) gets modded "Overrated"? Not sure if someone defaced the Wikipedia article everybody got this misinformation from, but CRTs televisions cannot display 1080p (1920x1080), period. Go look it up somewhere else.
There is no reason in principle that they cannot, although I doubt if we'll be seeing 1080p consumer CRT TVs; the advantage of 1080p at the screen sizes practically available in CRTs just is not that great. To my eye, every plasma display that I've seen looks terrible compared to my 1080i CRT, which is hardly the best available. LCD displays are starting to come close, although the main appeal is the availability of larger sizes, their shallower depth, and the fact that they don't weigh hundreds of pounds. Right at the moment, however, CRTs are the best buy in HDTV for their screen size range. 1080p in larger screen sizes looks great, but the maximum that I am willing to spend for a TV is about $1K. When I start seeing 42" 1080p LCD displays at that price, I'll start to get interested.
Re:DirectTV just lost my business because of this
on
DirecTV's New HD-DVR
·
· Score: 1
I would LOVE to have stayed with DirectTV, but the fact that they severed their deal with TIVO and will NEVER upgrade their current HD/TIVO box killed the deal. I honestly don't care what this guys says in his review, the difference is significant and it is like comparing a Honda to a BMW. Yes they both have similar features, but you are either a Honda guy or not. The Honda guys will say all day long that their car is feature for feature as good, but they don't own a BMW.
Yes, I'd have to hear raves from real TiVo owners to be convinced to switch to any other model DVR. I have the 10-250, and can pull in the local HD channels via a rooftop antenna (a little more weather susceptible than my satellite signal, but pretty good), so I'll stick with DirecTV until I can get a two-tuner HD TiVo for cable (either a Series III or Comcast's TiVo deal). Then it's "goodbye, DirecTV." I'd probably have been willing to stick with DirecTV longer, but the failure to roll out TiVo upgrades has soured me on DirecTV.
I don't think the problem is so much that we don't have highbrow games, as it is that no one, not even snooty columnists, recognizes them when they see them.
It is not that nobody knows how to make highbrow games, it is that they have never attracted a solid following. Highbrow films almost never attract the audiences of the blockbusters, but they have enough of a devoted audience that people keep making them. And as you point out, they rarely get the attention they deserve from reviewers. Even when a highbrow game like Myst comes out, reviewers feel bound to emphasize that it will probably not appeal to the typical action-oriented game fan.
If a JPEG image comes out of the camera with very low contrast, why is that the "real" scene and not an incorrect camera setting (contrast turned too low)? And if I then take a low contrast image in GIMP and adjust the contrast for better clarity, why is that a "fake" scene and not the "real" scene that I saw?
This is a bit ingenuous. Even before digital photo manipulation, a clear distinction was recognized between standard darkroom manipulations to adjust brightness, contrast, and color, and "trick photography" such as double exposures (which is analogous with what the photographer was doing with the Photoshop clone tool).
LGF's extreme anti-Muslim stance is often disturbing, but this is the second time that they've made a major contribution by outing negligent reporting by the mainstream media--they were also the first to identify the fraudulent "Bush memos" as crude forgeries.
That may be, but representing photoshop-retouched pictures as images of actual reality is more along the lines of fraud, although it might perhaps be motivated by bias.
Negligent homicide is also known as manslaughter. Just because you did not intend to kill someone with the drug you gave them does not absolve you of responsiblity.
However, you do have to be negligent. It is possible to be wrong without being negligent.
In this case, the company clearly did not do proper animal model testing before moving on to humans or they would not have destroyed these people's immune systems with their drug.
Are you sure about that? The reports that I have seen indicated that the company did do animal testing, and did not see this severe side effect. So far, the main criticism I have seen was that it was unwise to test the drug on 6 people at once--that they should have tried one person initially and waited to see how he did before trying it on others.
I see little point in Nintendo emulating Sony consoles--leave that to Sony. On the other hand, Nintendo could negotiate with Sega for the rights to emulate old Sega platforms: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.
MAN, seriously stupid post on Slashdot. These days, anyone saying ANYTHING negative about Nintendo, even making fun of the seriously stupid name, is going to get modded into oblivion.
I think this more reflects disappointment with what Sony and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft are bringing to the table than any great pro-Nintendo bias. I remember that at introduction the DS got roundly trashed on Slashdot in comparison to the PSP. And then the DS turned out to have the most fun games, and its much derided two-screen touch-sensitive design turned out to be the basis for a lot of innovative game design.
Much as demand for what was "great" by Ps1 and N64 standards died off as the Ps2 and Dreamcast ramped up and surpassed them, its VERY unlikely gamers will simply settle for what was good by Gamecube standards when The Ps3, 360, and PC are breaking new ground.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest successes of the XBox 360 is the XBox live games, most of which are roughly at the standard of SNES.
If you consider the genetic information as a big cark deck, then I would consider each organism to get a different hand based on the shuffle. More shuffles may produce better results. Maybe not. I'm just not going to expect a net increase in information based on new cards appearing.
Why not? After all, if you play enough hands of poker, you'll eventually gain information as to what hands are good and what hands are bad, even if you started out not knowing the game. The notion that information cannot increase by random processes is fundamentally foolish--a great deal of information can be acquired by random trial and error.
Error control mechanisms, at the very least, would very much run against the flow of blind Darwinian processes.
Error control mechanisms, which have been known for many years to exist, in no way run counter to expectations from Darwinian theory. In the short term, error correction improves fitness, because any given mutation is more likely to be deleterious than beneficial. In the long-run, however, too much error correction would be bad for the species, because the ability to evolve is required to adapt to changing conditions, and evolution depends upon a pool of variation, derived from those mutations that have not turned out to be particularly deleterious. Evolution has no foresight, so in most situations it is unable to produce change "for the good of the species," so one might worry that species might error correct themselves out of the evolution business. However, there is a short-term disadvantage to error correction--it costs metabolic energy that might offer a greater yield in fitness if used for other purposes. So selection supports the evolution of "just enough" error correction, where the fitness benefit in terms of reduced deleterious mutations just balances the fitness cost in terms of poorer energy "mileage."
That's not the best attitude toward software designers, especially when the designers need the flexibility to deliver the best user experience. Shouldn't they leave such moral decisions ("Nothing in right mouse clicks!" to designers and users?
Absolutely not. There are a lot of ideas that sound good--like putting menus at the top of the window instead of the top of the screen, or having important commands accessible only from pop-up menus--but turn out to be a real pain for most users. Part of the Mac's appeal is that they've managed to head off the worst of these.
There are two major styles of mousing. Some people like to rest their palms on the mouse--they like big, domed mice. Others prefer to manipulate the mouse with their fingertips, and use a wrist support if they need somewhere to rest their arms. They like small, flat mice. The Apple mice are clearly designed for the second camp.
I gave up a cordless mouse for the Mighty Mouse, and the wire has been my only complaint, because it occasionally impedes motion, so I've been looking forward to a wireless MM.
It's funny, however, the way that we finally got rid of all of the gunk-collecting balls on the bottom of the mouse by replacing them with a laser... now there's a gunk-collecting ball on the top!
The amazing thing to me is that I've had no trouble at all with it, despite heavy use--I was sure that tiny ball would be a source of problems. Maybe it has to do with its composition. I remember in the old days when mice had balls (no, I didn't mean that as a joke, but it sounds kind of funny, doesn't it?) some had white balls and some had black balls. The ones with white balls were constantly getting gummed up, while the ones with black balls needed to be cleaned only rarely.
On the other hand, if they ever find the neantherthal DNA, if it exists. I wonder how they are going to spin it to claim that it supports evolution.
It sounds like you've been suckered by the propaganda campaign of the Discovery Institute to convince the public that there is still a real debate among biologists regarding the validity of evolution.
The reality is that scientists are about as interested in looking for additional evidence to support evolution as physicists are in looking for additional evidence to support the existence of gravity. Both are regarded as long-settled issues. It is certainly true that such studies in principle have the potential to disprove evolution, if the genome of neanderthals turns out to be dramatically different from humans and apes, but considering the overwhelming evidence already available to support evolution, scientists regard that as about as likely as studying a new metal alloy and discovering that it falls up.
You don't get any credit for confirming what people already know, so when this work is actually published, you won't see anything in the paper about confirming evolution--it will concern the fine details of when neanderthals split off from other primates.
OK, I'm looking forward to Street Fighter, and I've been playing a lot of Robotron. I'm willing to shell out a few bucks to have them on my XBox 360 HD. But I hope that they go beyond the games that are already available on all of the classics collections. I'd love to see a full set of the original R-Type shooters, for example. And I'd definitely like to see more of the Capcom fighting games (and how about SNK?)
Another question is whether this will really be the arcade version of SFII. There was a rumor going around that it would be the Genesis version--hopefully that was in reference to the features, not the graphics.
I have Street Fighter Collection, so I already own the game. But I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for the convenience of having the game immediately available on my hard drive, with access to the XBox Live features and online play.
I'll probably be playing Blanka--some other characters are easier to win with, but somehow Blanka was always the most fun.
the Academy shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art, the actual expense of such investigations, examinations, experiments, and reports to be paid from appropriations which may be made for the purpose
You are talking about no-profit reimbursement of actual documented expenses for investigations requested by the government--which for a report like this basically means that he government paid for the printing of the report they requested. Nobody makes any money off this, and nobody gets any salary from the government. Members of the Academy donate their time pro bono. To suggest that this constitutes control is ridiculous: "Wow, I can get the government to pay for the xeroxing of the report they asked for! I want more of that! I better tell them what they want to hear, or they won't ask me to take any more of my time away from my paid work to work for free!"
That does not mean that the paper has been through the peer review process. Just because it's commenting on something that other people wrote doesn't mean anything. Nor is it a peer review. A peer review is an analysis of one particular paper, specifically focussing on the validity of the paper. This is just an opinion piece that talks about some papers.
No, peer review just means review by your scientific peers. Scientific papers go through peer review, but so do things like grant proposals and regional instrumentation centers. But as a matter of fact, this particular peer review was primarily of a particular study (Mann et. al., 1999, "Mann et al Northern Hemisphere Millennial Temperature Reconstruction" Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 6, p.759-762), which first presented the "hockey stick plot," taking into account subsequent criticisms of that paper. The NAS report wasn't an overall review of the global warming literature. The report stresses this point:
The reconstruction produced by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was just one step in a long process of research, and it is not (as sometimes presented) a clinching argument for anthropogenic global warming, but rather one of many independent lines of research on global climate change.
To insist the peer review by the NAS was not scientific because it was not itself peer reviewed is ridiculous. If it was, then presumably that peer review would not be scientific unless there was a peer review of the peer review of the peer review, which wouldn't be scientific unless it was also peer-reviewed, which wouldn't be scientific unless....
You seriously need to wake up and stop trusting your government. They've been manipulating the output of 'impartial' scientists and other bodies for longer than I can remember, why on earth do you think this one is any different? We usually find out about these things a few weeks or months later, when the media can ignore it because it's no longer news.
It's not a matter of trusting the government. I know some members of the NAS--these are extremely eminent and successful scientists. They are very independent thinkers and they don't see themselves as working for the government, and certainly are not the least bit interested in pleasing the government. They donate their time without compensation because they believe in the importance of an independent scientific body that is not subject to political pressure. That's why global warming skeptics in Congress specifically requested review by the NAS.
The 'report' in this article is an unreviewed publication from an organisation controlled by the government for the purposes of telling them what they want to hear. As such it has no more validity than any other political statement on the matter. This is not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's not 'real' science.
Wow. Wrong in almost every particular. The National Academy of Sciences is not controlled by the government and in fact is completely independent. It doesn't even get any money from the government. Members are elected based on demonstrated scientific achievement and excellence and receive no compensation for their service--it is probably the single most respected organization of scientists in the entire world. Membership is so highly regarded that universities brag about how many NAS members they have, and are proud if they are able to claim even one. To say that "this is not a peer-reviewed paper" is particularly stupid, because the report in question is itself a peer review of the validity of the "hockey stick graph" and its conclusions by the ultimate scientific peer review committee. And if any thing, validation of a human role in global warming is probably the last thing the current administration wants to hear. Indeed, the NAS review was requested by a Congressional critic of global warming in response to questions that had been raised about the validity of its methodology.
Is global warming bad? Probably not for everybody. On the other hand, the USA has one of the most temperate climates on the globe, which has a lot to do with our high food production. We are the last ones who should be wanting to role the climate dice again.
Slashdot Mirror
You are seriously comparing a movie based on a hit TV series with well-known popular characters and strong nostalgia appeal to a quickie thriller that nobody ever heard of before? It is amazing that SoaP made a tenth what Miami Vice made.
I have no idea, ask Philips - it's their monitor that won't display that particular resolution (and you're the one that linked to it). I would assume it has something to do with the 4:3 aspect ratio not lending well to the pixel density (or lack thereof) needed to display 1920x1080.
Actually, I didn't link to it. But it sounds about right for displaying 1920x1080 letterboxed.
So what, specifically, is the technical obstacle that makes 1920x1080 impossible for a CRT display, yet allows 1920x1440?
There is no reason in principle that they cannot, although I doubt if we'll be seeing 1080p consumer CRT TVs; the advantage of 1080p at the screen sizes practically available in CRTs just is not that great. To my eye, every plasma display that I've seen looks terrible compared to my 1080i CRT, which is hardly the best available. LCD displays are starting to come close, although the main appeal is the availability of larger sizes, their shallower depth, and the fact that they don't weigh hundreds of pounds. Right at the moment, however, CRTs are the best buy in HDTV for their screen size range. 1080p in larger screen sizes looks great, but the maximum that I am willing to spend for a TV is about $1K. When I start seeing 42" 1080p LCD displays at that price, I'll start to get interested.
Yes, I'd have to hear raves from real TiVo owners to be convinced to switch to any other model DVR. I have the 10-250, and can pull in the local HD channels via a rooftop antenna (a little more weather susceptible than my satellite signal, but pretty good), so I'll stick with DirecTV until I can get a two-tuner HD TiVo for cable (either a Series III or Comcast's TiVo deal). Then it's "goodbye, DirecTV." I'd probably have been willing to stick with DirecTV longer, but the failure to roll out TiVo upgrades has soured me on DirecTV.
It is not that nobody knows how to make highbrow games, it is that they have never attracted a solid following. Highbrow films almost never attract the audiences of the blockbusters, but they have enough of a devoted audience that people keep making them. And as you point out, they rarely get the attention they deserve from reviewers. Even when a highbrow game like Myst comes out, reviewers feel bound to emphasize that it will probably not appeal to the typical action-oriented game fan.
This is a bit ingenuous. Even before digital photo manipulation, a clear distinction was recognized between standard darkroom manipulations to adjust brightness, contrast, and color, and "trick photography" such as double exposures (which is analogous with what the photographer was doing with the Photoshop clone tool).
LGF's extreme anti-Muslim stance is often disturbing, but this is the second time that they've made a major contribution by outing negligent reporting by the mainstream media--they were also the first to identify the fraudulent "Bush memos" as crude forgeries.
True 'unbiased' reporting is a myth.
That may be, but representing photoshop-retouched pictures as images of actual reality is more along the lines of fraud, although it might perhaps be motivated by bias.
However, you do have to be negligent. It is possible to be wrong without being negligent.
Are you sure about that? The reports that I have seen indicated that the company did do animal testing, and did not see this severe side effect. So far, the main criticism I have seen was that it was unwise to test the drug on 6 people at once--that they should have tried one person initially and waited to see how he did before trying it on others.
I see little point in Nintendo emulating Sony consoles--leave that to Sony. On the other hand, Nintendo could negotiate with Sega for the rights to emulate old Sega platforms: Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast.
I think this more reflects disappointment with what Sony and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft are bringing to the table than any great pro-Nintendo bias. I remember that at introduction the DS got roundly trashed on Slashdot in comparison to the PSP. And then the DS turned out to have the most fun games, and its much derided two-screen touch-sensitive design turned out to be the basis for a lot of innovative game design.
Meanwhile, one of the biggest successes of the XBox 360 is the XBox live games, most of which are roughly at the standard of SNES.
If you consider the genetic information as a big cark deck, then I would consider each organism to get a different hand based on the shuffle. More shuffles may produce better results. Maybe not. I'm just not going to expect a net increase in information based on new cards appearing.
Why not? After all, if you play enough hands of poker, you'll eventually gain information as to what hands are good and what hands are bad, even if you started out not knowing the game. The notion that information cannot increase by random processes is fundamentally foolish--a great deal of information can be acquired by random trial and error.
Error control mechanisms, at the very least, would very much run against the flow of blind Darwinian processes.
Error control mechanisms, which have been known for many years to exist, in no way run counter to expectations from Darwinian theory. In the short term, error correction improves fitness, because any given mutation is more likely to be deleterious than beneficial. In the long-run, however, too much error correction would be bad for the species, because the ability to evolve is required to adapt to changing conditions, and evolution depends upon a pool of variation, derived from those mutations that have not turned out to be particularly deleterious. Evolution has no foresight, so in most situations it is unable to produce change "for the good of the species," so one might worry that species might error correct themselves out of the evolution business. However, there is a short-term disadvantage to error correction--it costs metabolic energy that might offer a greater yield in fitness if used for other purposes. So selection supports the evolution of "just enough" error correction, where the fitness benefit in terms of reduced deleterious mutations just balances the fitness cost in terms of poorer energy "mileage."
That's not the best attitude toward software designers, especially when the designers need the flexibility to deliver the best user experience. Shouldn't they leave such moral decisions ("Nothing in right mouse clicks!" to designers and users?
Absolutely not. There are a lot of ideas that sound good--like putting menus at the top of the window instead of the top of the screen, or having important commands accessible only from pop-up menus--but turn out to be a real pain for most users. Part of the Mac's appeal is that they've managed to head off the worst of these.
There are two major styles of mousing. Some people like to rest their palms on the mouse--they like big, domed mice. Others prefer to manipulate the mouse with their fingertips, and use a wrist support if they need somewhere to rest their arms. They like small, flat mice. The Apple mice are clearly designed for the second camp.
I gave up a cordless mouse for the Mighty Mouse, and the wire has been my only complaint, because it occasionally impedes motion, so I've been looking forward to a wireless MM.
It's funny, however, the way that we finally got rid of all of the gunk-collecting balls on the bottom of the mouse by replacing them with a laser... now there's a gunk-collecting ball on the top!
The amazing thing to me is that I've had no trouble at all with it, despite heavy use--I was sure that tiny ball would be a source of problems. Maybe it has to do with its composition. I remember in the old days when mice had balls (no, I didn't mean that as a joke, but it sounds kind of funny, doesn't it?) some had white balls and some had black balls. The ones with white balls were constantly getting gummed up, while the ones with black balls needed to be cleaned only rarely.
On the other hand, if they ever find the neantherthal DNA, if it exists. I wonder how they are going to spin it to claim that it supports evolution.
It sounds like you've been suckered by the propaganda campaign of the Discovery Institute to convince the public that there is still a real debate among biologists regarding the validity of evolution.
The reality is that scientists are about as interested in looking for additional evidence to support evolution as physicists are in looking for additional evidence to support the existence of gravity. Both are regarded as long-settled issues. It is certainly true that such studies in principle have the potential to disprove evolution, if the genome of neanderthals turns out to be dramatically different from humans and apes, but considering the overwhelming evidence already available to support evolution, scientists regard that as about as likely as studying a new metal alloy and discovering that it falls up.
You don't get any credit for confirming what people already know, so when this work is actually published, you won't see anything in the paper about confirming evolution--it will concern the fine details of when neanderthals split off from other primates.
OK, I'm looking forward to Street Fighter, and I've been playing a lot of Robotron. I'm willing to shell out a few bucks to have them on my XBox 360 HD. But I hope that they go beyond the games that are already available on all of the classics collections. I'd love to see a full set of the original R-Type shooters, for example. And I'd definitely like to see more of the Capcom fighting games (and how about SNK?)
Another question is whether this will really be the arcade version of SFII. There was a rumor going around that it would be the Genesis version--hopefully that was in reference to the features, not the graphics.
I have Street Fighter Collection, so I already own the game. But I'm willing to pay a few extra bucks for the convenience of having the game immediately available on my hard drive, with access to the XBox Live features and online play.
I'll probably be playing Blanka--some other characters are easier to win with, but somehow Blanka was always the most fun.
You are talking about no-profit reimbursement of actual documented expenses for investigations requested by the government--which for a report like this basically means that he government paid for the printing of the report they requested. Nobody makes any money off this, and nobody gets any salary from the government. Members of the Academy donate their time pro bono. To suggest that this constitutes control is ridiculous: "Wow, I can get the government to pay for the xeroxing of the report they asked for! I want more of that! I better tell them what they want to hear, or they won't ask me to take any more of my time away from my paid work to work for free!"
No, peer review just means review by your scientific peers. Scientific papers go through peer review, but so do things like grant proposals and regional instrumentation centers. But as a matter of fact, this particular peer review was primarily of a particular study (Mann et. al., 1999, "Mann et al Northern Hemisphere Millennial Temperature Reconstruction" Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 26, No. 6, p.759-762), which first presented the "hockey stick plot," taking into account subsequent criticisms of that paper. The NAS report wasn't an overall review of the global warming literature. The report stresses this point:
To insist the peer review by the NAS was not scientific because it was not itself peer reviewed is ridiculous. If it was, then presumably that peer review would not be scientific unless there was a peer review of the peer review of the peer review, which wouldn't be scientific unless it was also peer-reviewed, which wouldn't be scientific unless....
You seriously need to wake up and stop trusting your government. They've been manipulating the output of 'impartial' scientists and other bodies for longer than I can remember, why on earth do you think this one is any different? We usually find out about these things a few weeks or months later, when the media can ignore it because it's no longer news.
It's not a matter of trusting the government. I know some members of the NAS--these are extremely eminent and successful scientists. They are very independent thinkers and they don't see themselves as working for the government, and certainly are not the least bit interested in pleasing the government. They donate their time without compensation because they believe in the importance of an independent scientific body that is not subject to political pressure. That's why global warming skeptics in Congress specifically requested review by the NAS.
The 'report' in this article is an unreviewed publication from an organisation controlled by the government for the purposes of telling them what they want to hear. As such it has no more validity than any other political statement on the matter. This is not a peer-reviewed paper, so it's not 'real' science.
Wow. Wrong in almost every particular. The National Academy of Sciences is not controlled by the government and in fact is completely independent. It doesn't even get any money from the government. Members are elected based on demonstrated scientific achievement and excellence and receive no compensation for their service--it is probably the single most respected organization of scientists in the entire world. Membership is so highly regarded that universities brag about how many NAS members they have, and are proud if they are able to claim even one. To say that "this is not a peer-reviewed paper" is particularly stupid, because the report in question is itself a peer review of the validity of the "hockey stick graph" and its conclusions by the ultimate scientific peer review committee. And if any thing, validation of a human role in global warming is probably the last thing the current administration wants to hear. Indeed, the NAS review was requested by a Congressional critic of global warming in response to questions that had been raised about the validity of its methodology.
References to a lot of the primary literature can be found on the RealClimate web site.
Is global warming bad? Probably not for everybody. On the other hand, the USA has one of the most temperate climates on the globe, which has a lot to do with our high food production. We are the last ones who should be wanting to role the climate dice again.